From: Doug McIlroy
Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2019 21:26:44 -0500
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix
Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org
Sender: "TUHS"
I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators: How a Group of
Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution". It devotes
ten pages to Stallman and Gnu, Torvalds and Linux, even Tannebaum and
Minix, but never mentions Thompson and Ritchie. Unix is identified only
as a product from Bell Labs from which the others learned something--he
doesn't say what. I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory"
(about Bell Labs) barely mentions Unix. Is Isaacson blind, biased,
or merely brainwashed?
In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system
from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson,
Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest
innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs,
but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes
innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to marketing,
he seems to be more impressed by the later stages.
Or maybe he just likes to tell stories, and didn't pick up all the
good ones about Ken. Isaacson describes spacewar, arguably the first
stage of computer-game innovation, at great length. At the same time,
all he has to say about early-stage operating systems is a single
sentence that credits John McCarthy with leading a time-sharing effort
at MIT. (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.) He
tells how ARPANET, which he says was mainly developed by BB&N, connected
time-shared computers, but breathes not a word about Berkeley's work,
without which ARPANET would have been an open circuit.
"Innovators" won general critical praise. A couple of reviews predicted
it would become the standard of the field. However, an evidently
knowledgeable review in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing faulted
it for peddling familiar potted legends without really digging for
deeper insight. Regarding Thompson and Ritchie, it looks more like
overt suppression.
Doug